To really see the differences between the Micron enterprise SSD and the client SSD, you’ll need to look beyond the surface of capacity and slot type. The differences are found in the SSDs endurance, performance, and data protection levels. With Micron enterprise SSDs, you’ll discover extra overhead for endurance, more performance throughput to keep up with thousands of users, and a larger cache and with more data layers and extra large capacitors for secure protection at the multi-user enterprise level.
So often at Micron, we get asked, "What's the difference between a client and enterprise SSD?"
So let's take a moment and look at that. You often look at, of course, the capacity of the two drives, you look at what kind of slot it slides into, M.2, SATA, SAS, whatever you're using in your environment. But then the differences are a little bit hidden once you get past that, kind of how you're used to looking at storage.
So let's look at the three main areas where they tend to differ. So the first one is endurance. They're a lot like your favorite t-shirt, the more you wear, the more it wears out, tends to be around the number of writes you write to the drive. So what we do is we anticipate that.
In a client environment, it tends to be pretty bunched and bursty around the time you're using, say, your laptop to write a big file or write a movie on there. In an enterprise environment, there's thousands of VMs and thousands of users all writing to it over time, so there's a lot more wear to the drive.
We anticipate that and we build that in with extra overhead on the enterprise drive versus a client drive. We make it so they're both going to last years and years in your environment. The next thing you want to look at is performance. Of course, in the client drive you've got one person writing a PowerPoint file or whatever it is they're doing, so it tends to be a little bit less throughput.
We designed the enterprise drives so that they can have all those VMs, all those users pounding on the drive all day, no problem and keeps up with that and even gets ahead of it now. Next thing is data protection. Again, whenever you have your one client user doing the data, you've got the cache layer where essentially the cache comes in on its way to being written to the data of the drive.
In the client environment, you don't need to protect that cache, you've got local battery, you've got all kinds of things keeping that safe. In the enterprise environment, it can be a little bit less predictable, let's say. So we protect both the cache and the data layers because you've got thousands of people relying on that, you've got hundreds of apps and VMs relying on it, so we protect that with extra large capacitors in the enterprise side.
We also have a suite of software we build into our drives called our XPERT tools, and those help protect everything from power to data protection, to write data, all kinds of areas to make sure that your data is safe in the enterprise environment no matter what you do it. So these are the three main areas, data protection, performance, and endurance, that all make up a great enterprise drive.
If you want to learn more, just look at the link we're going to pop up here in a moment and you'll be able to go to micron.com and see what all is going on in all these different areas.